by akarnix
Aaron Manabat can't do twenty push-ups. He's twenty-one years old, he weighs forty-six kilos, and half of that is exhaustion. He hauls flour sacks for a bakery that shorts his pay whenever the boss feels like it, and his coworkers have a nickname for how thin he's gotten. He hates all of it, and he can't do a single thing about it.Then a blue screen appears over his chest at midnight and gives him a deadline. Daily Quest: Foundation. 20 push-ups. 20 sit-ups. 3 pull-ups. Failure penalty: Fatigue. He fails the first six. He does the seventh anyway. By the time he's done, his hands won't stop shaking, and the system hands him the first real meal he's had in weeks. That's the beginning. It gets faster from there. Every quest he finishes makes him stronger. Every reward he claims makes him richer. And every week that passes, the people who used to trip him in the hallway start asking a question he can't answer: where is all of this coming from? He's not stealing. He's not lying, not exactly. He's just a starving porter with a system no one else can see, climbing out of a bakery's back door one impossible quest at a time — and he has no idea yet how far up it actually goes.
